See also Commercial vs Open Source | Cookie-Cutter Portals | Mobile Portals
| Product | Work Proposed | Price | Difficulty | Project Size | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Setup | Ongoing | ||||
| free 3rd party open source shopping cart + hosting + ecommerce integration | Design, System Support | Medium | Low | Medium | Small-Large |
| WWWalker developed custom shopping cart + hosting + ecommerce integration | Development, Design, System Support | High | Medium | Medium | Medium |
| 3rd party commercial portal + hosting + ecommerce integration | Redesign, Maintain, System Support | High | High | High | Medium |
As open source CMSes have destroyed the market for commercial CMSes, I sell no CMSes written by myself now. I predicted this dumbing down in 2000.
We now install open source portals and tweak them for the user to maintain themselves or use and throw away as a beta site. The trend seems to be to setup and handover a site to a customer with no repeat business. The customer just wants the hard bits done by the developer such as installation, hosting and networking with the nicer bits such as design and content done by themselves.
As of July 2007, we are moving away from custom development to cookie-cutter style as most users have no idea what they want and the cost blowouts and slow payment of outstanding bills puts a lot of pressure on our equipment so it is not viable.
We specialise in online catalogues, search engine optimisation and meta data creation.
If you want a more powerful site, such as a content management system (CMS) or portal, we can build a custom one for you. These are much more expensive to setup and trouble-shoot but are a one-off cost.
We can integrate ecommerce into the site to allow you to take payments securely over the Internet:
Be warned: custom development is 4 to 5 times the price of buying off the shelf. This is due to feature creep, ongoing maintenance costs due to bugs, incomplete specification and infrastructure such as tools, repositories and backups.
Software development is costly!
We also maintain and upgrade or extend existing Web portals.
We are getting more and more requests from customers who have bought 3rd party portal software on the Internet from overseas or Australia and need us to customise it for them, e.g. install their logo, improve security or add new features. If you outgrow this site, we can build a whole new system for you and migrate you across.
Maintaining a previous developer's software (the person who developed your site before you called us in) is also about 10 times more costly than redeveloping from scratch due to getting up to speed including reading up and trying to work out what is not documented (reverse engineering and consulting to make the system work better using our knowledge from university and practical experience in the IT and information science industry.
We will rip up most of the old source and write our own to make the project cheaper, at least 50% cheaper with a much bigger bang for the buck! The site will probably need a data structure redesign to clean up all the lousy system design of the past. This revamp will add much value to your site. New better technologies can be introduced to streamline development and rework the tired old designs.
We prefer open source portals for preconfigured Linux/FreeBSD systems rather than Windows due to the high overheads of maintaining Microsoft Web servers and systems over Linux and FreeBSD. Also Windows customers tend to have very high expectations which a low budget cannot meet. Windows costs much more to maintain and upgrade than Linux or FreeBSD so it is not competitive to use for community or low-budget portals, only medium business portals.
We also move sites to new better quality hosting.
If the Linux/FreeBSD server is not configured there will be an hourly charge-out rate for sysop management. Using third party hosting is a much better way to go and is what we use ourself.
We push on with Linux. Incompetence in system choice is very high so we are proactive in being ahead of the customer in handling or managing the operating system they have and nudging users to Linux rather than Windows to make the project successful.
Users if they are using Web-based systems do not need to have their site running on Windows. Linux is OK.
Most users can only afford Linux but they will still push on with using far more expensive Windows system because of familiarity. They will have to outsource to a sysop or DBA (database administrator) to keep the system going (server and portal software maintenance). Our end is the development costs (the actual product).
Linux can integrate very smoothly with Windows and Mac and can do 90% of what a small company wants. To stop pushing prices down on development to cut costs, the user needs to adopt Linux with the help of a savvy developer like us.
If you choose Windows, we will charge the same for project support as we have our own project management system which handles any operating system or environment the customer can throw at us. This is to cover the extra system support, tools and knowledge required to maintain Windows and .NET software. Windows may be more powerful for middle-tier companies because they have already built 90% of their infrastructure on it for desktop users (not Internet) but more costly to move up to if you go the whole way with Microsoft. This cost was dropped as Microsoft and Novell make Linux and Windows more interoperable.
Unfortunately, many users try to cut corners and reduce the costs from Microsoft by underpaying software developers. We have to be very wise to keep a lid on this feature creep cost.
Microsoft make and support the Windows operating system providing developers with training and education to keep up to date.
Microsoft and Oracle work with third party products to be more flexible and less costly which makes local businesses like ours thrive.
We only supply limited support for installation of open source software on Mac OS X Server.
Australians like big stores (Coles mentality) which makes it very hard to find customers even by word of mouth, not my Website. The customer often jockeys to drive down the price!
Because of big companies' pathetic support, people rely on little guy's sites like mine to prop them up. We are a niche player in supporting others.
We are closer to the customer than bigger companies so can still compete.
See Quotes and Terms and Conditions for how we do our costing and manage the project.
Contact us for a pricing request for a portal to enhance and grow your online business.
Created: 24 Jan 2006 17:57
Last Updated: 5 Oct 2011 21:19